Throttler

The Throttler Pattern allows you to ensure that a specific endpoint does not get overloaded, or that we don't exceed an agreed SLA with some external service.

Options

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Name

Default Value

Description

maximumRequestsPerPeriod

Maximum number of requests per period to throttle. This option must be provided as a positive number. Notice, in the XML DSL, from Camel 2.8 onwards this option is configured using an Expression instead of an attribute.

timePeriodMillis

1000

The time period in milliseconds, in which the throttler will allow at most maximumRequestsPerPeriod number of messages.

asyncDelayed

false

Camel 2.4: If enabled then any messages which is delayed happens asynchronously using a scheduled thread pool.

executorServiceRef

Camel 2.4: Refers to a custom Thread Pool to be used if asyncDelay has been enabled.

callerRunsWhenRejected

true

Camel 2.4: Is used if asyncDelayed was enabled. This controls if the caller thread should execute the task if the thread pool rejected the task.

rejectExecution

false

Camel 2.14: If this option is true, throttler throws a ThrottlerRejectExecutionException when the request rate exceeds the limit.

Examples

So the above example will throttle messages all messages received on seda:a before being sent to mock:result ensuring that a maximum of 3 messages are sent in any 10 second window.

Note that since timePeriodMillis defaults to 1000 milliseconds, just setting the maximumRequestsPerPeriod has the effect of setting the maximum number of requests per second. So to throttle requests at 100 requests per second between two endpoints, it would look more like this...

from("seda:a").throttle(100).to("seda:b");

For further examples of this pattern in use you could look at the junit test case

Dynamically changing maximum requests per period

Available as of Camel 2.8 Since we use an Expression you can adjust this value at runtime, for example you can provide a header with the value. At runtime Camel evaluates the expression and converts the result to a java.lang.Long type. In the example below we use a header from the message to determine the maximum requests per period. If the header is absent, then the Throttler uses the old value. So that allows you to only provide a header if the value is to be changed:

Asynchronous delaying

Available as of Camel 2.4

You can let the Throttler use non blocking asynchronous delaying, which means Camel will use a scheduler to schedule a task to be executed in the future. The task will then continue routing. This allows the caller thread to not block and be able to service other messages, etc.